Food and drink

Food for thought: Kathy, the Pique and other contemplations

It’s with a sodden heart that I put digital pen to
illuminated paper this week in the shadow of Kathy’s death.

It’s hard to think of anything else except her and loss and
the implications for Bob, their families, Piquesters regular and irregular, the
people and initiatives she spurred on, the community at large — each of us tied
to her in our own way.

I’ve thought about what small stick of value or meaning I
might contribute to the bonfire of tributes and sad notes of mutual condolences
that have been pouring in, and will continue for who knows how long.

What I bring to the wake is my perspective as an
inside-outer — someone close to the publication but not on staff. And my
perspective as another newspaper woman who loves publications that do the right
thing. And as
publisher/editor/reporter/designer/janitor/fixer/booster/salesperson who saw
the
Question
through tough but rewarding
years — the era right before Bob and Kathy worked there — who’s gone on to
start, shepherd and, occasionally, say sad good-byes to other small but vibrant
newspapers.

And while this is a food column, the fact I feel free to
appropriate that tired but seemingly appropriate cliché of “food for thought”
as a metaphor to drive what I want to say here speaks volumes, no pun intended,
about Bob and Kathy and the
Pique
and my
take on why their work, her work, is so important.

Here’s a big point: it’s a marvel and a miracle, one that
continuously grows in rarity and value, that we writers and artists who feed
the
Pique
are given… nay, are actually
paid to express ourselves in this free-wheeling forum without feeling that an
editor’s hatchet or a publisher’s purse strings or some off-base directive of
what sells newspapers from head office in Toronto is dangling over our heads or
throttling our throats.

People might intuitively grok the
Pique
, but they might not fully understand why they love
it so.

I believe it has much to do with this freedom thing —
embodied by the little riff on “Free” on the cover each week (a Kathy idea).
Free to remember… Free miracles?…
Free tales from the deep… Free to be imaginative, spunky, genuine,
original and relevant.

’Tis a sorry state of affairs but few, very few publications
that rely on advertising for revenue — including the big boys, the ones you’d
swear could rise above it all, financially and otherwise — can or will stand up
to pressure from advertisers and bean counters who interfere with the holiest
of holies in the newspaper biz, the editorial “hole” — the space that’s not
ads, where the news and columns and letters and editorials run, and readers
should and must feel that what they read there is free from the stink of power
or money, the pressure from business managers or the I’ll-buy-an-ad-if-you-run-an-article-on-my-widget
routine.

The old
Citizen
that
the late Cloudsley Hoodspith ran (bless him) was notorious for such hijinks. A
thousand years ago when I had the
Question
, the then highers-up at Whistler Mountain Ski Corp. threatened to pull
all their advertising if we ran a letter to the editor complaining about the
lousy on-mountain food in general and navy bean soup in particular. They even
sicked on me the late, great Dave Murray (bless him, too) to argue their point.

We ran the letter; they didn’t pull their advertising. But
it was scary. The readers were the biggest customer, but the mountain was the
biggest revenue source and it could break the spine of a small paper in a
flash.

So don’t you just
know
that what you read in the
Pique
is free — free from influence-peddling, from pandering, from fear-mongering —
and always has been? That takes guts, especially when you’re just starting out.

Another thing: it’s rare that a newspaper, even the biggest
of the big boys, pays for original writing, never mind original art these days.
Get this: the
Globe and Mail
pays less
than half of what the
Pique
pays
contributors. Unlike the
Pique
,
they want wire copy, all rights to original work (so you can’t sell it
elsewhere), all things serialized, digitized, image banked. Anything that saves
costs but contributes to the overall homogeneity of, well, us.

See all those
Pique
covers of original art piling up every week for the past 14-ish years? That’s
728-plus pieces of art from artists who were paid fairly for their work and had
the joy of seeing it featured. Then there are the original short stories, the
freelance photos, the essays.

In an nutshell, freedom + creativity = character, all of
which we love about Whistler and which Bob and Kathy have distilled, page by
page, loonie by loonie, into the
Pique
.

Besides all the other moments of silence we’ve had this
week, I hope you pause for a minute and contemplate what a keystone this
enterprise has been on so many levels — to readers, staffers, contributors and
advertisers, who know the paper is read voraciously and their dollars aren’t
wasted. It’s a collaborative effort whose whole is bigger than the sum of its
parts, with each part — so sorely we now notice that one is missing — vital to

Here’s a reminder: Newspapering is a funny business. The
paper has to come out week after week after week, when you’re sick, the monies
are low, the receptionist has run off with a dancer, a reporter quits in a
huff, the power fails, you don’t really feel like it, the software crashes,
there’s no real news. Even when one of your original freedom fighters is killed
in a terrible accident.

And there it is, like a string of laundry out to dry for all
the neighbours to see and comment on, with the stains you couldn’t get out, the
missing sock, the colours that ran, the good silk shirts, the ratty underwear
(which you might try to hide in a pillowcase).

The funny thing about running a newspaper is that you
usually don’t hear much about the good stuff you do. Mostly you hear the
complaints.

But that’s the usual way of it. After this extraordinary
week, I just bet that months and years from now people will step back a bit,
consider what this little-paper-that-could means to them, and beam a message to
Kathy. As for the ones down at Function in the office, including Bob when he
gets back, you can simply tell them.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who
can’t think of what to add here this week.